A potential criminal case against Imperial Sugar Co. — long on the back burner — may now be off the stove.

Or maybe not.

Almost five years ago, an inferno at Imperial Sugar’s Port Wentworth refinery killed 14 people and hurt dozens more.

Two federal probes found company officials knew for years about deadly hazards there but didn’t correct them.

So the chronic clouds of sugar dust that can explode like dynamite eventually did on Feb. 7, 2008.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration extracted $4 million in civil sanctions for safety violations.

Moreover, OSHA left open the option of criminal prosecution against Imperial or its employees.

“We do have willful violations that are related to fatalities,” Cindy Coe, OSHA’s regional administrator, said in 2008. That, she added, is the threshold for asking the Justice Department to consider prosecution.

Coe’s remarks came during the business-friendly Republican administration of George W. Bush.

About the same time, then Democratic Sen. Barack Obama implied he favored criminal charges in cases like Imperial’s.

Obama was on a committee that held a hearing focused largely on the Port Wentworth catastrophe. He didn’t attend, but issued a statement afterward.

He noted the panel earlier chided OSHA for not pressing criminal charges for violations that allegedly killed workers.

“Occasional fines in isolated cases, like in the case of Imperial Sugar, will not solve the problem,” he said.

Obama, of course, is about to begin his second term as president.

As recently as July 2010, Patricia Smith, the Labor Department’s top lawyer, called consideration of criminal prosecution “quite active.”

Early this year, OSHA spokesman Micheal Wald, who has since retired, said it hadn’t been ruled out.

But last week, Wald’s successor — Michael D’Aquino — referred a query about the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The latter barely needs a live person to handle such inquiries. A recording would do fine; it routinely declines to comment. Last week was no exception.

So why the feds’ de facto shift from maybe to no comment?

Maybe it’s because Imperial is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Louis Dreyfus Commodities, which bought the company this summer.

Lawyers can thrash out which of Imperial’s liabilities Dreyfus assumed. But it may be hard to stick it for what Imperial did — or failed to do — years ago.

Or maybe the feds have been pre-occupied, for example, by the 2010 British Petroleum rig explosion that killed 11 people and fouled the Gulf.

That disaster — unlike the one in Port Wentworth — rode high in the national TV news for months.

Last month, the government said it’s fined BP $4.5 billion. Meanwhile, it’s pressing criminal charges against three BP employees.